Why do so many statics seem to be missing healers? What can be done to solve this?

[Taika]

you seem to be missing the real reason no one wants to heal anymore. People treat us like shit.

I don't know, I've been healing in this game since 1.0, raiding from Coil to Creator Savage, done all extremes as healer, and I still heal for experts, extremes, and Omega normal, on two different data centres (after ARR) and I have felt like being treated "like shit" maybe 5 times total (probably less). Of course it might be that I've just been extremely lucky during my 3669 instanced raids / trials (based on Achievements), but to me it seems that if you feel like you're constantly being treated "like shit", it might be smart to take a long, good look at the mirror.

[era1Ne]

I don't know, I've been healing in this game since 1.0, raiding from Coil to Creator Savage, done all extremes as healer, and I still heal for experts, extremes, and Omega normal, on two different data centres (after ARR) and I have felt like being treated "like shit" maybe 5 times total (probably less). Of course it might be that I've just been extremely lucky during my 3669 instanced raids / trials (based on Achievements), but to me it seems that if you feel like you're constantly being treated "like shit", it might be smart to take a long, good look at the mirror.

There are more than 10 Million accounts in this game, so experience will vary and i can say with years of healing that i exp, the worst and the best when it comes to healing. With that said, i get what you wanted to say - maybe a bit to harsh - him or other healers in this thread. Yes, there are toxic people out there, but i wouldn't say the whole community is this way. For example, two healer friends of mine are in a more casual static and everyone there, including the healers have time to grow there and try to learn from their mistakes. As i said earlier, you shouldn't think every mistake was your fault, despite some people saying so, but you shouldn't think you couldn't have done better either. Don't go into the extremes, if that makes sense and learn what your mistake was and what wasn't.

For instance i have seen healer saying the photon + 2x whirlwind attack in a11s isn't healable solo, but it actually is. Jus for the record, you should heal and dps together, but if the other healer is dead - i was in this case - then you have no option. Of course for someone who healed hundreds and hundreds ex fights + some savage fights, this is easy to say, because if you heal for years, than you have the experience and confidents to do it. This may sound arrogant at first, but my point is an completely different one. We all started at some point, had neither exp or confidents and when i look back at my first healing attempts and the huge amount of mistakes i made in the beginning, then i believe those guys when they say, "healing this and that big pull or healing this healer check alone is impossible". It was impossible for me aswell and i strongly believe for every healer this was the case at some point in their learning process. But you should never make the mistake and think it actually is impossible, because most of the stuff under the right circumstances isn't. Try to ask healer main or look at live streams to learn what those guys are doing differently than you

[Tridus]

One factor I think that hasn't gotten much attention is encounter design. The encounters are so tightly scripted at that level that memorization is a significant part of success. If you don't find memorized healing fun, you're going to have issues wanting to keep doing that content no matter what. Oh this thing is happening in 10 seconds so you need to be here, pop your cooldowns at 2:31, and so on. Reactiveness is a dirty word in some circles here, but in a lot of other MMOs it's a fundamental part of healing.

That first room in Auran Vale is one of my favorite things to heal in the entire game because it's the opposite of that. It's so much more chaotic and unexpected things happen frequently when pulls go wrong, but it's often recoverable if you handle it well.

That's not something the community can fix, though. Making encounters a bit less predictable has to come from the top.

[technole]

My new team went thru a lot of healers... I knew my first cohealer wasn't cutting it but it took until 03S for everyone else to take notice, then it was the hunt for healers that can do their job while contributing dps and that took a surprising amount of trails. We found one and I like him a lot but O3S and more so 04S just show that when many of these healers actually get a little responsibility/pressure added in the mix they crumble.
..
Anyways its a healthy trimming of the fat.

Yep, you can slouch through O1S/O2S as a healer, not beyond that.

Definitely raid DPS is probably the #1 reason why the 3rd turns of each savage tier starts to be the "weed out" for some roles that can't play their job at a respectable raid-level. Like you need about 23.5k raid DPS to clear O3S. So if you have a raid with even average damage dealers, let alone maybe just one that's well above average, yet you have healers that barely do any damage at-all, that's going to be big wall to overcome. Naturally there is also the healer checks too, so it's more about being a "complete" healer.

[Sebazy]

I've played mmo's for years, probably before may of these posters where born. Then they come along and say things haven't changed. Yes they bloody well have. And it's not a pleasant change by any stretch of the imagination.

It's not even a recent thing though IMHO. Look back to the ground zero of raiding aka Everquest (Check out that 4 digit magelo profile yo) and most guild interactions were fairly pleasant both internally and between 'rival' guilds especially when you factor in how competitive raid content was. The only ever saw things get properly salty when the Sleeper was woken up on BB, Planes of Power also had a bit of drama over triggers getting killed to block other teams but that was as far as it went.

WoW had the makings of being worse still, competitive pvp, competitive world pve with the threat of pvp, /spit emotes ahoy and such, yet the community always felt pretty solid. I dropped WF for literally every last vanilla HWL warrior on the server and helped out in PvE raids with most of the raiding guilds as well despite spending always being in a guild of 1. There was even a good sense of camaraderie with the Alliance regulars, I paid my respects to my greatest pvp nemesis after he passed away. Before I quit I even got the loan of a fully geared out Paladin to do a comedy all stars alliance WSG team with those I'd PvPd against for so long. Absolutely amazing community and I still miss it to this day =(

FFXIV kind of sits in a weird place between the two games. Whilst there's kind of a community feel to the likes of Idylshire and Rhalgr's Reach, PF and DF are altogether a bit too anonymous. It's all too easy to be inconsiderate and insensitive towards the player behind the character because it's a fair assumption that you'll likely never bump into them again. Combine the anonymity with world PvE content and things turn very salty very very quickly.

Then FFXI came along..... I was pretty fortunate in that I was well known and liked, some of the things I saw happen were just shameful. Far far worse than any drama I've ever seen in FFXIV.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I don't know, I've been healing in this game since 1.0, raiding from Coil to Creator Savage, done all extremes as healer, and I still heal for experts, extremes, and Omega normal, on two different data centres (after ARR) and I have felt like being treated "like shit" maybe 5 times total (probably less). Of course it might be that I've just been extremely lucky during my 3669 instanced raids / trials (based on Achievements), but to me it seems that if you feel like you're constantly being treated "like shit", it might be smart to take a long, good look at the mirror.

Likewise, I scarcely ever see public healer shaming. In all my experiences, it's usually DPS that get picked apart the most, followed by tanks not using CDs. Even in some of the discord channels I frequent, the "shitposting" tends to be laughing at low DPS numbers on a parse they copy/pasted. Low healer DPS gets more of an eye roll than outright ridicule.

[QT_Melon]

Likewise, I scarcely ever see public healer shaming.

There's plenty of threads complaining about healers that don't DPS, however, I do think part of the problem are healers that still refuse to DPS during Savage content. Savage for everyone has a tendency to ask people to use their skill set more deliberately than a dungeon. It's not just healer DPS, it's like correct cycling of CDs for a tank to handle Tankbusters or other mechanics. That one skill that someone took off their hotbar becomes more useful "oh this is where we need to use Silence" "Oh that Mantra is gonna come in handy for an Ultimate".

[Shihen]

you seem to be missing the real reason no one wants to heal anymore. People treat us like shit. We're your scapegoat when things go wrong, you scream at us for not dpsing when your pulling half the damned dungeon, then you scream at us for letting you die when we try to comply with your demands for said dps.

You want healers to come back? start treating us with respect. I've played every role in this game and I can say healers are the most shit on. I heal because I enjoy it but my god do I question myself when I have to put up with this bullshit.

Good friend of mine used to say the same thing all the time. Great guy IRL and a pretty solid healer in WoW's mythic raiding scene, so after hearing the complaints for a while I came along for a few runs to see what was up. He was a terrible healer. Good enough to get through dungeons in one piece, but he made every run painful and irritated every party by refusing to dps on principle. No healing cds, late esunas, inconsistent regens, poor medica timing, and non-existent precasts. By far his biggest problem was an inability to take criticism, though it was understandable to a point because he would usually only get criticism after someone in the party had had enough and their criticism came out hostile.

Eventually after some one on one talks he did change his playstyle a bit and he did get better, but he still balked at the areas that would take more than a basic amount of effort to get better at and his reasoning was "I don't really care enough tbh, I just play this game to have fun with you guys". Understandable, and eventually he did drop the game, but it made me realize perspective can be a hell of a drug. From his, he was doing everything a healer was supposed to do and getting shit on for it. From mine, he was half-assing everything a healer is supposed to do, and getting shit on for being lazy. He's what comes to mind when I see the healer victim complex rear its head on this forum.

Really bad groups do happen, but they're extremely rare imo. What I think actually happens is you get a group where everyone in it thinks they're better than they really are, and the stubbornness that got them there in the first place keeps them from taking the responsibility they need to get out.

[Trunks]

I have literally never been treated badly "as a healer" in this game; quite the opposite, actually. I have, however, seen a fair few hypersensitive healers get immediately defensive at the slightest suggestion or lightest criticism.

There are a lot of reasons people shy away from healing. One of them is scapegoating, certainly. But I think a bigger issue is that at the low end, content is mind-numbingly easy and gets even moreso once you're farming it. Well, what's there to do but DPS? I legit fell asleep while running Ala Mhigo for my roulette this evening. Spamming Stone IV is neither engaging nor rewarding.

Meanwhile, at the high end, damage values are so stupidly high (which they have to be because we have shielding) that it creates undue stress for a lot of people. Only the most seasoned healers aren't going to panic when they see an HP bar go from 100% to <20% in one hit, but that's routine damage in raid content. It's a visceral thing.

This leads to a healing gameplay where the primary cause of death is GCD bottleneck. Often times these bottlenecks are the result of another failure further upstream (e.g., Vuln stacks). But because the "game over" message flashes up on the healer's watch, the blame gets passed to them. Unless you have great awareness and are constantly logging, it's hard to defend yourself. That's the source issue: your average player has trouble understanding the chain of events that led to group failure on the fly. The default is to look at the immediate cause of death: people ran out of HP, musta been the healers.

[Mirateski]

I would. Don't get me wrong, sometimes i am really annoyed about tanks DD or whatever, but at the end of the day, i absolutely love the job and the responsibility and teamwork that comes with it. .

As someone who once fumbled awareness, which I pair with sheltron for crit hit, and ate it raw, nothing on god's green earth short of an exceptionally lucky critlo will save you even with palisade up, unless maybe the crit hit was feinted. I enjoy healing, although I don't main it, and I take a particular pride in coordinating with my cohealer through charybdis etc, but... I just don't like healing idiots. High damage, fine, the high stress environment of savage is awesome, although three book waltzes in the last phase of 3s can go die in a fire.

But I'm really losing my temper with people who are Just Plain Bad in high floors of savage, and I feel that other people experiencing the same issue might also contribute to a lack of healers. It's not so mmuch healing that idiot pld (or, in their case, rezzing them after the just straight die), it's that you know that pld will be blaming you for the death, even though you told them multiple times to use a goddamn cooldown already.